Update: The theme you see now isn’t Blog.txt, but its sister theme, veryplaintxt. Both themes are designed by Scott Wallick, and are available at plaintext.org, the very finest source for minimalist Wordpress blog themes. Veryplaintxt is a less versatile theme than blog.txt; but in certain circumstances, including the present ones, that’s a good thing rather than a bad thing. You see, veryplaintxt is a 2-column theme, whereas blog.txt is adaptable; you can set it up in either 2-column or 3-column format. How can that be bad? Well, even when the blog’s phenotype is 2-column, its underlying genotype is 3-column, which means that behind the scenes that single sidebar over to the right is divided into Sidebar 1 and Sidebar 2. And when you’re trying to debug a sidebar, or anything else, complexity is to be avoided. So I’m going to work with the simpler format.

Besides, there are some things about this theme I like. The big gray open quotes that start out each block quote, for example. I never really liked the gray boxes that were part of blog.txt. Or maybe I’d just gotten tired of them.

Update 2: Switched back to blog.txt, for various reasons.

The early vaisesika texts presented the following syllogism to prove that all objects i.e. the four bhutas, prthvi (earth), ap (water), tejas (fire) and vayu (air) are made of indivisible paramanus (atoms): Assume that the matter is not made of indivisible atoms, and that it is continuous. Take a stone. One can divide this up into infinitely many pieces (since matter is continuous). Now, the Himalayan mountain range also has infinitely many pieces, so one may build another Himalayan mountain range with the infinite number of pieces that one has. One begins with a stone and ends up with the Himalayas, which is obviously ridiculous - so the original assumption that matter is continuous must be wrong, and so all objects must be made up of a finite number of paramanus (atoms).

Seems to me that it’s obviously invalid because, if you start dividing up a stone into infinitely many pieces, you’ll never finish.

At one point of his stay among the Mongols, William entered into a famous competition at the Mongol court, as the khan encouraged a formal debate between the Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims, to determine which faith was correct, as determined by three judges, one from each faith. The debate drew a large crowd, and as with most Mongol events, a great deal of alcohol was involved. As described by Jack Weatherford in his book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World:

No side seemed to convince the other of anything. Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations
concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.

—Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, p. 173

For example: Steve Esser at Guide to Reality has a link to a paper by
John Conway and Simon Kochen called “The Strong Free Will Theorem” (HT). Steve’s summary of the argument:

The theorem begins with axioms which, while idealized, flow from accepted aspects of quantum theory and relativity and then concludes that if humans are assumed to be free in setting up experiments, then particles have the same kind of freedom in selecting
among experimental outcomes.

I just copied and pasted that previous paragraph, including the quotation, without having to switch browser windows or type in the URLs for the links. Cool, huh?

Anyway, that’s a twist in the quantum theory/determinism discussion I haven’t heard before: the assumption that scientists are free in setting up their experiments is an important factor to take into account.

Even the most cursory consideration of the literature reveals that when philosophers talk of metaphysics and metaphysicians they are not always talking about the same sort of thing. Among the activities to which they may be found to be referring, the following three seem most prevalent:

(i)The term ‘metaphysics’ is sometimes taken, perhaps most often among Anglo-American philosophers, to designate a mixed bag of problems which seem to belong together because, in some manner or other, each involves claims which employ, in some important way, the notions of reality, existence, necessity, possibility, or some such similar notion. A man who “does” metaphysics in this sense is one who devotes some modicum of effort to one or more of the following sorts of topics: the problem of the nature of God, man, causality, time, and substance, the problem of free will, the mind-body problem, the indeterminism/determinism controversy, and the problem of personal identity. Moveover, often the problems of other “areas” of philosophy, such, as ethics, epistemoloygy, and logic, are taken as having metaphysical aspects. Such an aspect often seems to appear whenever one or more of the aforementioned notions, namely, reality, existence, necessity, possibility, etc., intrudes into the discussion in such an way that one must maek substantive claims about its proper employment in that context. Let us call this overall area of philosophical interest metaphysics in the liberal sense.

(ii)Sometimes, however, the term ‘metaphysics’ is taken to apply to that enterprise wherein one is concerned to arrive at ultimate principles, i.e., those principles which are of the most general yet applicable sort. What is said to fall under such principles is quite everything which may be in our experience, feeling, thought, and action — in a word, anything that may appear in our lives. When metaphysical claims are characterized as the most general which can be made, as the most inclusive, or as the necessary presuppositions of human thought and experience, it is this sense of the term which is usually being invoked. The ideal, then, of this sort of enterprise is to frame a complete and coherent account of such principles or categories. When we have them, we have gone as far as we can go in scope and ultimacy. This ideal is, in fact, often conceived as the framing of a system much like a scientific theory, but of a much broader applicability and requiring perhaps for its furtherance additional methodological notions. There are many problems internal to this enterprise, and there are the external problems of whether one can intelligibly or profitably engage upon it. But one who claims to be a metaphysician in this sense claims to be doing something quite determinate. What is being provided, it is thought, is a framework in terms of which the problems of metaphysics in the liberal sense and, indeed, all problems, philosophical or otherwise, find their intelligibility if not their solution. Let us call this area of philosophical activity universal science.

. . .

(iii)But now, some philosophers do not think that the project of universal science is “metaphysical” in the right way. They wish, instead, to hit upon those categories and principles which are true of the way things are in reality. In referring to “reality” in this way, they wish to refer to something the notion of which is not itself a category or principle within the system. Thus, given a system in which, for example, the term ‘reality’ appears as an ultimate notion, they wish to claim tha the system, as a whole and therefore including the systemic use of ‘reality’, is true, not in the sense of being applicable to whatever arises in our lives, but in the sense of being true of whatever is “real”, “in the universe as it really is,” or simply “in reality.” . . . This new . . . possible role of the term may be called “metasystemic”, for it is a role involved in making a claim about the system as a whole. Now, those who do this sort of thing, who attempt to construct and defend a system about which a claim of this sort can be made — which is what some people sometimes are thinking of when they talk of metaphysics — may be said to be doing ontology. The project is, thus, to provide the most general picture of the way things really are.

You don’t do serious zoology by just strolling through the zoo, noting this and that, and marveling at the curiosities. Serious zoology demands precision, which depends on having agreed-upon methods of description and analysis, so that other zoologists can be sure they understand what you are saying. Serious phenomenology is in even greater need of clear, neutral method of description, because, it seems, no two people use the words in the same way, and everybody’s an expert. It is just astonishing to see how often “academic” discussions of phenomenological controversies degenerate into desk-thumping cacophony, with everybody talking past everyone else. This is all the more surprising, in a way, because according to long-standing philosophical tradition, we all agree on what we find when we look inside at our own phenomenology.

Doing phenomenology has usually seemed to be a reliable communal practice, a matter of pooling shared observations. When Descartes wrote his Meditations as a first-person-singular soliloquy, he clearly expected his readers to concur with each of his observations, by performing in their own minds the explorations he described, and getting the same results. The British Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, likewise wrote with the presumption that what they were doing, much of the time, was introspecting, and that their introspections would be readily replicated by their readers. Locke enshrined this presumption in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1696) by calling his method the “historical, plain method” — no abstruse deductions or a priori theorizing for him, just setting down the observed facts, reminding his readers of what was manifest to all who looked. In fact, just about every author who has written about consciousness has made what we might call the first-person-plural presumption: whatever mysteries consciousness may hold, we (you, gentle reader, and I) may speak comfortably together about our mutual acquaintances, the things we both find in our streams of consciousness. And with a few obstreperous exceptions, readers have always gone along with the conspiracy.

This would be fine if it weren’t for the embarrassing fact that controversy and contradiction bedevil the claims made under these conditions of polite mutual agreement. We are fooling ourselves about something. Perhaps we are fooling ourselves about the extent to which we are all basically alike. Perhaps when people first encounter the different schools of thought on phenomenology, they join the school that sounds right to them, and each school of phenomenological description is basically right about its own members’ sort of inner life, and then just innocently overgeneralizes, making unsupported claims about how it is with everyone.

Or perhaps we are fooling ourselves about the high reliability of introspection, our personal powers of self-observation of our own conscious minds. Ever since Descartes and his “cogito ergo sum,” this capacity of ours has been seen as somehow immune to error; we have privileged access to our own thoughts and feelings, an access guaranteed to be better than the access of any outsider. (”Imagine anyone trying to tell you that you are wrong about what you are thinking and feeling!”) We are either “infallible” — always guaranteed to be right — or at least “incorrigible” — right or wrong, so no one else could correct us.

But perhaps this doctrine of infallibility is just a mistake, however well entrenched. Perhaps even if we are all basically alike in on our phenomenology, some observers just get it all wrong when they try to describe it, but since they are so sure they are right, they are relatively invulnerable to criticism. (They are incorrigible in the derogatory sense.) Either way, controversy ensues. And there is another possibility, which I think is much closer to the truth: what we are fooling ourselves about is the idea that the activity of “introspection” is ever a matter of just “looking and seeing.” I suspect that when we claim to be just using our powers of inner observation, we are always actually engaging in a sort of impromptu theorizing — and we are remarkably gullible theorizers, precisely because there is so little to observe and so much to pontificate about without fear of contradiction. When we introspect, communally, we are really very much in the position of the legendary blind men examining different parts of the elephant.